To support a demand to provide applications that involve high data rate transmission to multiple hosts, multicast routing has evolved. Multicast routing is used to send data communications to multiple receivers on a network utilizing a multicast address. By sending only a single transmission stream intended for multiple receivers, multicast conserves bandwidth. Multicast is often used by financial service providers and professional media content generators in a wide range of multicast applications, which depend on network support of multicast for network replication of traffic to all receivers. However, multicast is not widely deployed outside of private data centers and walled garden networks.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the several views of the drawings.